work. life. open source. diatribes.

Each year after Google’s Summer of Code (SOC) program is over, Google holds an informal Mentor Summit (unconference style) at their HQ to allow mentors to meet each other and talk about their experiences. I will be representing Eclipse with a couple other mentors at the summit (if there are any Eclipse developers in the area that want to chat over a frosty beverage, let me know) this Friday. I plan on holding a session about tooling in general. There were a couple other open-source projects like Joomla and GIT that had students working on Eclipse-related tooling… finding out how things went for them, what pain points they had and how to better work with other open-source projects next year that decide to do Eclipse-tooling with students.

I’m a big fan of the SOC program as it’s an excellent way to attract contributors, meet new people and build cool technology. In my case this year, Ian Bull did some fantastic work around Plug-in Visualization which has always been a pain point with plug-in developers. As part of that work I was even able to push my own “Eclipse agenda” and get a visualization toolkit Ian help write into GEF (164387,205121). One step closer to that lightweight visualization toolkit I want in the SDK 🙂

Last but not least, here is the full list of Eclipse’s Summer of Code results: